Death's head dh-1

by David Gunn

  Neen selects Lord Filipacchi’s own bedroom, complete with silk hangings and a huge bed that labors under the weight of a vast fur. From the glances he’s been giving Maria, it’s obvious who he wants to crawl under the fur with him.

  Shil and Franc decide to share a much smaller room on the floor below. As for Haze, he drags a mattress into a ground-floor office stacked with computers and hits the larder and kitchens for all the carbohydrate he can find. When I check, he’s flicking his fingers across a slab, pulling up real-time pictures of the city.

  “How did you do that?”

  He jerks his thumb toward the ceiling. “HiSats, sir,” he says, “self-focusing. They’ll stay in orbit until the U/Free tell them to come down or their packs run out of fuel. Thought I might as well take a look.”

  THE KNOCK ON our door comes ten minutes later. It’s heavy, someone hammering their fist against solid wood. We’re meant to be impressed, so I let them wait.

  “Soldiers,” says Maria. She’s looking nervous.

  “How do you know?”

  “Lenz,” she says.

  So Haze flicks his fingers over the slab, replacing his satellite pictures with a shot of a Death’s Head officer and two corporals.

  “Sir.”

  He’s accessed the house system and cut to tight focus so I can see the flaring nostrils of the smartly dressed lieutenant. Needless it say, it’s Miles Uffingham, the idiot who collected me from the tent when Colonel Nuevo wanted someone to talk to his ferox.

  “Let them in,” I tell Maria. “Say we’ll be down in a moment.”

  Haze gets Neen, and I drag Shil and Franc out of their room. We’re a mess, uniforms torn and faces filthy.

  “Arm yourselves,” I tell them.

  “You don’t think-”

  “Obviously not,” I say. “But we should look like we mean business.”

  “We do, sir,” says Neen.

  “Ahh…Tveskoeg. Here you are.”

  I’m meant to remember Uffingham’s name, return the compliment. I can’t be bothered. There are few staff officers who couldn’t be improved by a hollow-point implant to the back of their neck, and Miles Uffingham isn’t one of them.

  “The colonel wants to see you.”

  “Okay…”

  “You might want to change.”

  “Into what?”

  Turning on his heels seems to be a habit with this man. So we follow the lieutenant out of our own front door and into the square in silence, and I’m glad to see my group are scanning the roofline, behaving like proper soldiers. The man we’re following just marches straight ahead as if snipers don’t exist.

  “Visitors for the colonel.”

  The guards let their eyes drift across us. At least two of them are doing their best not to grin.

  “You hear me?”

  “Yes, sir.” Their immaculately dressed sergeant snaps to attention, and I wonder if Uffingham has any idea how much contempt is in that salute. As we follow him through the door Colonel Nuevo’s staff stop talking.

  Maybe it’s the girls, still in their head scarves and both clutching enemy pulse rifles, or maybe it’s the bloodstains down Neen’s uniform. Or maybe it’s just me, with my missing sleeve and prosthetic arm.

  “In here…”

  The room to which we’re shown is huge and hung with pictures so old the paint’s cracked. Since the Enlightened don’t believe in pictures, this house has to belong to someone important enough to be left alone. And it has that pragmatic mix of old and new, wooden furniture and intelligent doors, china plates and drexie boxes to pull food out of nothing.

  “Expensive,” says the gun when I wake it from sleep mode. “Tasteful, quietly understated, obviously the home of a connoisseur…”

  You can tell it hates the place.

  “Just scan the bloody room.”

  It does, and tells me we’re being targeted by 205 different weapons, which it considers overkill. I’m saved from arguing by the entrance of an orderly.

  “The colonel will see you.”

  “Keep quiet,” I tell the others. “Answer only if asked a direct question, don’t stare at anyone, and let me do the talking. Understand?”

  “Sven.”

  My salute is smart enough to make Colonel Nuevo smile.

  “You look like shit.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A dozen officers stand near his desk, almost half of them militia officers or legion; some don’t even look like regulars at all. It makes me wonder what they’re doing here.

  “You want to tell me what’s in your hair?”

  It takes me a moment to remember. “Dead Enlightened,” I say. “Used his braids to disguise myself, haven’t had time to wash him off.” This is not strictly true. It simply hadn’t occurred to me.

  “You scalped an Enlightened?”

  “Yes, sir…though I killed him first.”

  “Glad to hear it.” The colonel is smiling. “And his scalp was enough to disguise you?”

  “Used one of his tubes as well. Across my chest and into my hip.”

  “Tricky to glue?”

  “No need, sir. I cut holes.”

  “In yourself?”

  I nod, lift my shirt so he can see the scar.

  “And what were your auxiliaries doing?”

  “Killing Uplift guards, sir. Plus a NewlyMade and a two-braid. We saved the Uplifted until last.”

  “You killed the Uplifted?”

  “Yes, sir.” I’m nervous for the first time since entering this room. Some very strange emotions are messing with the colonel’s face.

  “How?”

  “I shot it.”

  Colonel Nuevo shuts his eyes.

  “It was dying, sir. Already senile. Probably long beyond questioning. Any routines it ran were from habit. The equivalent of remembering to breathe.” The voice isn’t mine and it certainly isn’t anyone who is meant to be speaking. Haze has gone bright red, as if he’s just remembered what I said about silence.

  “You are-?”

  He’s about to blow everything, I just know it.

  Instead, Haze salutes. “One of the team, sir. My name is Haze. I took the Uplifted apart, what was left of it.”

  I don’t remember giving him permission to do that.

  “What did you find?”

  “Anemone optic, diamond memory, couple of teraflips of quantum processor, the usual…”

  The colonel is looking at him very strangely. “Usual for what?”

  “A machine, sir.” Haze looks around him, goes red again. He knows he’s the center of attention; his thoughts are just too much on the question in hand to realize why. If Haze did, he’d be white and it would be with fear. What he’s said is close enough to blasphemy to make no difference.

  “It was dying,” I say. “Maybe already dead.”

  “And your man is describing its body?” The colonel considers that. “Machinery is to a dead Uplifted what meat is to a dead human-say, to the dead body of Trooper Haze himself?”

  I nod, trying not to hold my breath.

  A second later the colonel nods. “That would be it,” he says. His gaze flicks over the room, challenging them to disagree. No one does.

  “Line up.”

  We do as ordered, coming to attention. At which point Major Silva appears carrying a black silk cushion. Both officers stop in front of me.

  “For being first into the city I promote Sven Tveskoeg to full lieutenant, awarding him the Obsidian Cross, second class…”

  I salute, because I can’t think of anything else to do.

  Major Silva offers Colonel Nuevo the cushion and the colonel hangs the medal around my neck and everyone salutes again. As the colonel steps back a sergeant appears. He’s carrying an armful of filthy clothes. They’re the uniforms I made Franc, Shil, and Haze abandon before we entered the tunnel.

  “Draw new clothes,” orders the colonel. “Retain your patches.”

  The sergeant follows us from the room. He w
ants to make sure we collect the uniforms we’ve just been promised.

  CHAPTER 32

  Ilseville square stinks of vomit, smoke, sex, and piss. A Death’s Head sergeant is taking a woman against a tree while a queue of junior NCOs wait their turn. Her child sits in the dirt, happily oblivious to what’s going on above. An Uplift temple is in flames, and one of the corporals waiting his turn is wearing the tasseled cap of a high priest.

  Bars and brothels are hastily reopening in the streets behind us, making the best of what is going to happen anyway.

  A trooper feeds hungry flames with broken furniture outside our house, and a beast turns on a spit above his fire. With its four horns and narrow shoulders, the animal looks rare and exotic, as if stolen from a zoo.

  Heat has blackened its skin, and the drunken trooper who carves a fist-sized chunk from the beast manages to end up with a meal that is both burned and bleeding. If he doesn’t end up on his knees vomiting from alcohol, he’ll probably go down with food poisoning instead.

  “Is it always like this, sir?” Shil’s voice is quiet.

  “Always,” I say.

  A trooper stumbles into me and I put him into a wall, angry not at his drunkenness but by knowing I was once him, half cut and impatient, waiting my turn for a skirt in a town that had just fallen.

  “Lock the doors,” I order Maria.

  She nods.

  To the others, I say, “You can go back out, or you can stay in. Either way, your choice is made for the night. This door remains locked until morning.”

  Neen opts for a night in the city.

  Shil would object, but he outranks her and I’m watching.

  Franc glances at Haze, who shakes his head. And so the decisions are made. Neen slips back through the door and everyone else stays inside.

  “Let me know when you’ve locked up,” I tell Maria.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll be in my room.”

  She’s twenty-three, with a birthday in two weeks’ time, silken body hair between her legs, and nipples that look strangely pale in the candlelight. Her hips are full and so are her buttocks, too full really for my tastes, but her breasts are high and hard and she sits astride me with no shame, rocking herself into an orgasm that looks convincing.

  “What’s your other name?”

  “I don’t have one, sir.”

  “No,” I tell her. “Nor do I, not really.”

  She leaves my bed with a couple of red handprints on her buttocks and a bite below one breast. I have no doubt that, if ordered, she’d come to my room again.

  “See you later.”

  Maria giggles.

  Midnight comes and goes, darkness deepening as clouds take the moon, and the blackness of the sky only serves to make the fires in the streets outside look brighter. Some are simple bonfires, others more serious. From a window on a landing two floors above the front door, I can see at least five burning houses, and something larger also in flames. Another temple maybe, or a brothel where the alcohol was too expensive or the whores insufficiently willing.

  Steps creak and I spin.

  A dot dances across the wall and finds my chest, remaining there. “Who is it?” demands Shil, her voice steady. She’s clutching a pulse rifle.

  “It’s me.”

  “Sir?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Me.”

  “Do we have a problem, sir?”

  “No. I’m just watching idiots burn the city. It’s fine, go back to bed.”

  She hesitates.

  “’Night, Shil…”

  Five minutes later, when I get to the top of some stairs, I find her at a window watching the flames, her rifle forgotten. She’s quite obviously worrying about her brother.

  “Trust him,” I say.

  “It’s easy for-” she begins, then stops. “Sorry, sir.”

  “He’s your sergeant,” I say.

  “Your choice.”

  “Yes,” I agree. “My choice.” There’s something in my tone that makes her turn. We’re very close to an argument, and it’s not one she can win.

  “Franc might make a good sergeant,” she says finally.

  I smile. “Franc’s a hairbreadth from insanity. Don’t get me wrong, I really like that in a woman, but as a replacement for Neen?” I shake my head. “It’s never going to happen.”

  “What about me, sir?”

  “You’re volunteering?”

  Shil nods.

  She says nothing when I stand behind her, and even less when I grip her shoulders, feeling them tremble. Her arm muscles are tight, and her shoulder blades hard-edged beneath the cloth of her borrowed nightgown. I can count off every rib as my fingers drop to her side, and her hip is sharp beneath my hand for the second it takes her to twist away from me.

  “Is that your price?” she demands.

  “Why? Is that what you’re offering?”

  Her slap almost connects and then she’s against the wall, one hand twisted high behind her back.

  When I step away, her fingers drop toward a knife on her hip that isn’t there. The action is entirely instinctive, and says more about her previous life than I’ve discovered in days.

  “Neen’s a natural,” I tell her. “Deal with the fact he’s your brother or I’ll transfer you.”

  CHAPTER 33

  A knocking wakes me, and a trooper announces that one quarter of the city has risen. He’s not looking for me in particular; his orders are to rouse every house in the square. Other soldiers are working the streets behind us.

  Neen is behind the soldier, slouched on our doorstep. He has a black eye to match the graze he got climbing from the sewer, but he’s awake and mostly sober and looking very pleased with himself.

  “Good night?”

  Scrambling to his feet, he snaps out a salute.

  “Yes, sir. Very good, sir.” If he notices Shil’s sourness he brushes it off, assuming it has more to do with him than me.

  “Helmets,” I tell everyone.

  Neen has to go upstairs.

  Pulse rifles at the ready, we hit the street. At which point something becomes obvious. My team are militia and I’m Death’s Head, but many of the soldiers out here are neither.

  We’re outnumbered by mercenaries. Not legion-type mercenaries: Sign on, get paid shit, and die to order. These are the other kind, freelance looters, people discharged from militias for being too vicious or damaged to take orders, ex-penal-battalion officers, the sweepings of half a dozen prison planets, people like the person I might have been.

  “What?” demands Shil, seeing me stop.

  I wait.

  “Sir.”

  “Mercenaries.”

  “Came in on the final drop,” says Haze, and then blushes.

  He’s been up all night, patching himself into the data feeds. We have quite an audience, apparently. Propaganda is one of this war’s greatest weapons. It’s why OctoV complains about U/Free observers, Greater Council monitors, and freelance data collectors, but lets them in anyway.

  “Take point,” I tell Neen. “We’ll be right behind.”

  He leads us between dying bonfires and drunken troopers being kicked back to sobriety. Gunfire comes from a low-lying district ahead, which explains the column of black smoke rising in front of us.

  The batwings are back.

  “That’s not possible.” Haze is staring up at the sky.

  Rolling as languidly as a fish surfacing, a tiny plane twists itself around its own axis and drops like a supercharged stone. It keeps dropping and a second column of smoke joins the first.

  “Someone’s controlling them,” I say.

  He nods, and Franc points beyond distant walls to where another batwing is dropping from the clouds.

  “What does it mean?” asks Franc.

  It means we’re fucked.

  But I don’t say that, because that’s one of the things you just don’t say. “Insurgents,” I tell her. “Must have a few left over from yesterday. Not sure ho
w they’re controlling them.”

  There’s another Uplifted, obviously.

  A gap stands like a broken tooth in a row of houses ahead. The buildings on both sides are cheap, fiber-made, and already rotting. Past the gap, the ground dips and we can see even cheaper buildings beyond. In the middle of these stands a metal turret, black with age and ringed by shacks that huddle below what look like flying buttresses. After a second, I realize they’re fins.

  “What happened to the house?”

  The trooper stops, registers my rank, and salutes. “Control post, sir. Got hit just before dawn. Killed a captain.”

  I let the man go, and he scurries away with obvious relief. The next person I see is Major Silva, still looking neat as always and still wearing his tiny spectacles. He greets me with a smile, which tells me all I need to know about how serious this situation is.

  “The colonel’s waiting.”

  We follow the man through a roadblock, under a bridge that supports a broken railroad, and into the rubble of the ruined building.

  “Sven…”

  “Sir.”

  “They had a belt-fed in the turret and snipers everywhere…” He steps closer. “Lieutenant Uffingham volunteered to clean them out.”

  “What happened?”

  “You’re the new senior lieutenant.”

  Apparently my Obsidian Cross automatically gives me five years’ seniority. I can take a wild guess how the other lieutenants feel about that, not that I care.

  “We’ve got rockets,” I say. “Why not just blow the thing to fuck?”

  Colonel Nuevo’s eyes flick sideways, and I see a girl wearing the uniform of a recognized U/Free observer.

  “Meet Paper Osamu,” he says. “She has plenipotentiary status.”

  Plenipo…what? “He’s ex-legion,” my gun tells her. “Up through the ranks. He doesn’t understand stuff like that.”

  “There are civilians down there.”

  “And up here,” says the gun tartly. “Doesn’t stop the machine heads crashing their planes on us.”

  “They’re not machine heads, ” Ms. Osamu says, pronouncing the words with distaste.

  “Well, they’re sure as fuck not human.”

  At this point I take Colonel Nuevo’s unspoken advice and put my gun back into sleep mode. The next few seconds are wasted as Neen and I go into a huddle. It’s obvious from the shock on the faces of my fellow officers that they think this outrageous. But too many battles have been lost because officers were too grand to take advice from their NCOs.